Blog #14 Chapter 19

I was really surprised reading about the Opium War, especially reading how the Chinese were involved with it. I also thought it was also funny to read how they looked back at that part of history and reflected it as a time of humiliation. Knowing about the stereotypes linked to the Chinese people today learning about history probably could never really imagine them getting into drugs, it was even shocking for me to read. Unlike any other drug, the involvement of drugs always has consequences, which was prostitution. I feel that drugs and prostitution goes hand and hand with each other, such as where there is a big problem of drugs, that area would have a problem with prostitution. Just like how opium was big during that century, opium is becoming a famous drug again mainly among young adults. Which is also call “brown bagging” where they put various types of opium in pill form and they just pick one and take it. It was interesting to me to read about this section about opium and the trade and how it affected China, because I am also reading about opium and other drugs in another class. It was good reading the background and history behind opium. Opium is commonly like by early adults, and adults tend to take opium for several reasons, the main reason adult take opium is their way to handle stress, anxiety, and depression, which is not the proper way of handling these issues. It was also interesting to read how the Opium War helped China evolved and it lead them into following industrial practice. I still feel like China still follows industrial idea based off what I heard. I think this because China is known to have various strict work factories and the workers are paid not enough. It reminded me a lot of the European Industrial practice between the middle and lower class. How terribly the lower class was treated when working in the factories, as well as the conditions they worked in. China was once known as having children working in sweat shops in these harsh conditions, just like the orphans in Europe. I watched a video about China social classes how children were in school for a certain period of time, and then after school they went to work in the factories located in their towns. This industrial revolution had such a big impact on China especially in today’s century. China is the main country that is involved with trading in addition multiple of big companies send their factories overseas for the people in China to work them. It is like the industrial revolution is the reason why China is doing so good economically. I found reading the document Memorial to Emperor Guangxu very powerful especially the statement “you will see that if we can change, we can preserve ourselves, but if we cannot change we will perish” (Strayer, 959). It is important for the community or a society to change, to evolve among other countries in order to be civil and understand the time the world is living in.